Posted on 08/12/2020 2:31:56 PM PDT by Jonty30
All of the plantation “jobs”
what jobs????? everyone worked in the fields if it wasn’t cotton it was food. To just live....when it came crop time even Lily White Granny was in the fields, it was a hard life you know nothing about...
Why did lincoln want to save the union? the south was a separate country, and He ordered troops onto a foreign land to invade and conquer, subjugate anothe4 population. all the while trampling on the Constitution. slavery or not, the war was an invasion of a foreigne land.
There you sit in front of the greatest library in all human history and you post half baked stupid crap. Unbelievable.
As Limbaugh says... follow the money.
There was a moral component against slavery. The largest was still economic and also political. 4 mil freed former slaves could have gone in several unintended directions.
1) a backlash army against whites and the USA.
2) 4 mil new republican voters.
3) they could have elected to go back to Africa and that would be minus 4 mil workers.
Monet is the driver. Since ALL finance went through NYC it was in the interest of the bankers and industrialists to soft land any I insurrection.
Southern wages had a upper limit thanks to slavery.
Of course you’re not going to argue that fact. I guess you could argue the import, but I see no way to claim it wasn’t significant.
And, of course, having the Southern capitalists being dependent on slavery meant their investment decisions benefitted slavery.
(Again, as today’s capitalist decisions have benefitted China- to the disadvantage of US workers.)
After the North destroyed the South and bought for nothing what was left, the South was a 3rd world, poverty-struck area that couldn’t improve until after WW2.
My Dad left a NC sharecropping situation for the military. A typical event in the South at the time.
A lot of veteran benefits, payments have helped the South.
Be that as it may, without slavery there would have been no war.
All excellent points. I was at the New Orleans Archives museum a few years ago and the docent who was showing us documents in the collection said that to the Southern slave owners, it was as if the federal government were suddenly taking away their farm equipment. Some of them were into African inferiority, some of them not, but all of them relied upon this - as you say, cost-inefficient, outdated - labor. However, they probably would have been amenable to solutions.
I’ve always blamed Charleston for the Civil War, not only because they fired on Fort Sumter, but because they had a whole strange theory of slavery and southern life worked out. But keep in mind that it was South Carolinians who destroyed the Spanish Franciscan Indian missions In Florida and either killed or enslaved the Indians, and also particularly wished to get rid of the Spanish presence because slaves who made it to Florida were free.
South Carolina was very committed to slavery ideologically even after England ended it. It was also the scene of the Stono Rebellion because their treatment of the slaves was so bad. When they put down the rebellion, they punished some of the leaders by burning them to death before an audience in downtown Charleston.
And of course the first Democratic Convention of 1860 was held in Charleston, where they effectively managed to get rid of somebody who would have been more compromise-oriented on the slavery question. South Carolinians, much more than any other single group in the South, regarded slavery as the be-all and end-all of Southern existence, and they dragged the rest of the South along with them.
From the inception of the nation, the banks and investment firms controlling most of the investment capital in the United States have been located in the northeastern states. First in Boston and then later in New York where they remain to this day.
One of the great tragedies of the after Civil War period was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln whose policy was “with malice toward none and charity for all.” He wanted to rebuild the southern economy without slavery and bring the southern states back into the Union quickly. When Lincoln died the Radical Republicans ensured the south would be punished through military occupation for 10 years. In addition, the northeastern states withheld capital from the devestated southern economy.
If you look at the period from 1865, to 1900, when the US economy enjoyed the greatest boom in its history, the south languished while investment poured into the midwestern and western states. Instead of building factories in the devastated south, where newly freed slaves and poor white laborers could be employed, the northern investors built factories in the midwestern and western states. Millions of poor immigrants were imported from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and other European countries to provide labor for the new factories of the north and for the farms being developed on the Great Plains.
Meanwhile the south, starved for investment and hard currency, essentially reinvented slavery in the form of the sharecropper system. Freed slaves became serfs to white farming landowners. Jim Crow laws were passed making blacks second class citizens without the rights promised citizens by the Constitution.
Consider what could have been. Investment poured into the south to provide agricultural and industrial jobs to employ the vast numbers of unemployed and rebuild the economy. Restricting immigration to ensure the jobs go to the American poor instead of imported European poor. Investment in education for the newly freed slaves. which with factory jobs, would have given them a route to the middle class and stake in the economy. A booming economy in the south, and increasingly literate freed slave population would have done away with the competition of poor whites and freed slaves for limited jobs in a broken economy. In addition there would have been no economic incentive for Jim Crow segregation laws.
Rinse and repeat. A little over 100 years later, in the 1990’s, northeastern investment capital was steered toward building new factories in China and other Asian companies instead of replacing the aging and less productive US factories built after WWII in the 1950’s and 1960’s. American jobs were lost to foreigners by the millions but this time investment dollars went overseas instead of being spent in a different region of the United States. The middle class is dying, the nation is bankrupt, and racial strife is returning to all time highs.
Get your flame suit on.
Not that I necessarily think much of your theory, but anything suggesting Yankees didn’t fight solely to free people they knew virtually nothing about will be shot down.
I guess powling behind a mule isn't as bad as powling around with terrorists (to use Sarah Palin's phrase).
The early cotton mills were in the North (which gave the mill owners common political interests with the cotton planters before the war). The cotton mills in the South came later.
"Forty acres and a mule" might have been a good policy (provided that the government paid for the land and did not just seize it) but it wasn't implemented except briefly in a small area.
To preserve the Union.
“All of the plantation “jobs” were held by slaves.”
No. Immigrants also worked in the South, Seems like Italians made up the most. Along with Germans, Swedes, Hungarians, Danes, Poles.
There was an article some years ago about the Stono Rebellion which argued that the slaves involved were Catholics (from the Kingdom of Kongo, where the king had converted to Catholicism) who were trying to get to Spanish Florida hoping that the Spanish would recognize them as free. The Portuguese and Spanish believed it was OK to enslave pagans but not Christians.
Similarly, just because someone opposes abortion does not mean that they have to be able and eager to adopt unwanted children. Yet many who are pro-Life do in fact support and even adopt otherwise unwanted children. Similarly, after the Civil War, the North supported newly freed slaves in many ways.
Unfortunately, Darwin's "scientific racism" relegated Blacks to an inferior status and gradually dissolved the North's determination to protect the newly freed slaves. The, gradually, the fundamental American principles of freedom, equality, and fair treatment reasserted themselves through legal and political demands for civil rights.
And, to make the larger point clear, as bad as Black Lives Matter is, it is fueled by the profound misrule that Black Americans suffer from due to liberalism. Conservatives have spent decades proposing reforms. We should now put forward an urban reform agenda that smashes education bureaucracies in favor of vouchers and charter schools and liberates small business from excessive regulation.
The GOP should also reclaim its historic purpose as the advocate for reforms that make Americans more free and our country a better place to live and prosper in accord with our great principles.
Let me try to summarize with this oversimplification:
It’s complicated, but largely based on the fact that slavery is immoral and not only hypocritical to the constitution as it was laid out, but also unchristian. The abolitionists existed even before the declaration of independence and there were fractures amidst the political class over the issue of slavery at our country’s foundation. Keeping slavery legal was a compromise between the northern states and southern states to form the union that could resist the British military.
Now why did the North support abolition while the south condemn it? Economics.
The North was industrializing and New York was the primary landing point of immigrants from the old world (there were other ports of call too, but NYC was really the nexus from which immigrants landed and spread throughout the North). Immigrants would mostly stay in the city’s immigrant friendly boroughs, work for low wages, long hours, and generally wouldn’t complain, so factories had the perfect labor resource to operate with. Slaves were more costly in that you had to pay a fairly expensive rate to buy one, then you had the upkeep costs in food, clothing, housing, and security that you didn’t have to pay to manage the immigrant workforce. Slaves were also seen by many at the time to be a lessor race and it was viewed that white immigrants were more productive than black slaves in factory work.
The South had generations of slave labor at their disposal and actually made a living in trading slaves as well as producing agricultural goods. The South also had a more insular culture that was not as immigrant friendly as the North, which discouraged migration. This locked the South into the tradition of slavery and didn’t allow them to start moving away from it.
The Republican party was founded from the collapse of the Wig party and some members of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party based solely on the principle of abolishing slavery. When Lincoln was named their candidate for president, the South threatened to succeed from the union since they understood that their institution of slavery would be in the balance.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Now as a Republican, I sincerely hope this changes your perception of “No one caring about the slaves” as it was exactly our caring about slaves and the injustice of their condition that made us create our party and stand with them. Many of us still stand with all Americans today and believe in preserving their individual liberty at all cost. The Democrats and radical left simple project their own totalitarian faith upon us and try to paint us as uncaring greedy capitalists. The fact that Capitalist actually means “individual” as independent of the collective and directly refers to liberty, I for one am very greedy for all the liberty I can get. But, I still care about you regardless. Just don’t touch my liberty or else!
It was more the Battle of Antietam that ended the chance of British intervention. At that point, Confederate victory could not be guaranteed and it gave the British government pause. The Lincoln announced, and then implemented, the Emancipation proclamation and that ended the chance completely.
“south a huge over representation in Congress.”
That is exactly the point. It tipped the enumeration towards the south.
“So please stop provoking each other on FR.”
Who is provoking who here?
Remarkable that there are bastards on this site who will stand up for the most sordid history of this nation caused by the southern states and still claim to be conservatives.
How is that for a “talking point?”
Wrong ! Try again.
Wrong, but thank you for playing.
The European powers declined to aid the South...
Well, France did invade Mexico.
The Republicans eventually drove them out after finishing with the democrats in the civil war.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.